In large organizations where huge amounts of documents are handled, there is a demand for compression of digital images. For example, banks store digital formats of checks. More than 200 million checks are written is USA every day, and some banks store the digital format of the checks on line for several months. Additionally, government offices store great quantities of official forms and documents. In order to decrease the size of the digital information, many of the documents are compressed. Compression of digital images decreases the required storage capacities and reduces the transmit times of the images.
In some instances, images may comprise different types of information, such as, text and graphics. As such, the digital image may either be stored as a single image, or may be separated to several images, each image compressed and stored separately. There are various known in the art methods for image separation and compression, such as image segmentation and JPEG, respectively.
If the image is saved as a single image, it typically requires a lot of storage space. It is therefore desireable to save the original image as two or more separate images. However, techniques to separate text from graphics are less than optimal. Thus, there exists a need for improved image separation and compression tools.